Five short links

CLAVIN – A very promising open source geotagging project that analyzes unstructured text and identifies geographic entities. It has some very neat tricks up its sleeve to disambiguate common names like 'Springfield' based on the context.

The Sokal Hoax: At whom are we laughing? – Post-modernism makes an easy target for hard scientists, but this is a good reminder that some of the giants of physics made even more meaningless pronouncements about fields they knew nothing about.

Name-cleaver – A scrumptious little project from Sunlight Labs that handles a lot of the messy data cleanup work around people and organization names.

altmetrics: a manifesto – On the topic of scientists being silly, the way we measure academic output is antiquated beyond belief, so it was great to see this from my friend Cameron Neylon. We can do way better than citations.

Improving the security of your SSH private key files – This is what happens when hackers (in the old-school sense) get interested in a topic. Martin's curiosity about how SSH works led him to find out some sub-par default settings that make a passphrase on your keys a lot less effective than you might think. I didn't know about those particular problems, but I've always followed my Apple and kept my keys on an encrypted DMG.